Why Four Gospels is now available for iTunes and Google Play, and continues to be available for Kindle. While it’s nice to have these new formats, it is still available in print, and my price check on Amazon.com today showed $8.48 retail.

1) I am pleased to announce that The Pericope of the Adulteress in Modern Research has been accepted for publication in T & T Clark’s Library of New Testament Studies series. You may recall that SEBTS hosted a major conference on this topic in April of 2014 .

Well, the papers have now been assembled in book form. Yours truly and my former assistant and current Th.M. student Jacob Cerone are serving as editors. Here are the contents:

I’ll just say that I’m delighted that Gail O’Day agreed to write the foreword and Larry Hurtado the response. And, of course, I am grateful beyond words to T & T Clark. If this book in an way contributes to even one person coming to a better understanding of this key New Testament passage, then the conference was worth the effort a billion times over.

11:44 PM Just wanted to say hello before going to bed tonight. I spent a few days in the Dallas area over the weekend, primarily to attend a conference sponsored by Brite Divinity School and featuring Adela Yarbro Collins of Yale. Her topic was the Gospel of Mark, which happens to be the current subject of investigation for my book on the kingdom. The lecture was less stimulating that I had expected. Perhaps my expectations were misplaced. I was hoping for a rigorous reassessment of the faith claims of the Gospel of Mark in a way that laypeople unfamiliar with New Testament scholarship could understand. To be sure, Collins touched on this subject tangentially, but the majority of her lecture repeated well-known assertions about Mark — Mark is our earliest Gospel, the words “Son of God” (1:1) were added later, the last twelve verses of Mark are inauthentic, the Messianic Secret is the interpretive key to understanding this Gospel, etc. Given that the final verses of Mark have now been given a definitive defense I was surprised at how unpersuasive Collins was in trying to refute it. Moreover, I didn’t find any of her objections to the historicity of Mark’s account plausible. Jesus Christ is the most remarkable individual who ever lived. Nobody else can even remotely match His record in terms of literature, health, education, music, and so forth. Those of us who are not put off by the testimonies of the evangelists know that in Him we have found the way of salvation and true life. When there is reason to think that an evangelist has placed words in Jesus’ mouth, it can be interesting to decide whether our suspicions are based on facts or suppositions. Readers of this blog will realize that I write from a less skeptical viewpoint than that. Indeed, the more difficult a saying of Jesus seems to be (e.g., the famous “I am” sayings of John), the more likely they are to be original in my view. I applaud much of Collins’ exegesis of various passages in Mark that explain why Mark’s Gospel reads like Mark’s Gospel. But none of these conclusions satisfies the main question of interpretation, so her exegesis misses the mark. Most importantly, when she says “You can’t point to anything in the Gospel of Mark and say, ‘This is what Jesus said or did,'” her conclusion is, in my opinion, completely without merit. Given the fact that many New Testament scholars have affirmed the historical reliability of the eyewitness testimony of the evangelists, I feel justified in relying on the Gospel records as the most complete and authenticate records in all of human history. This means that the New Testament does indeed provide us with an answer to our most important question — who is Jesus Christ? Ultimately, He is who He said He was — the Son of God who takes away the sins of the world. It strikes me as more humble and more reasonable to assume that if the early church didn’t see contradictions between the Gospels, we shouldn’t either. Let me add that I do not for one minute suggest that the Gospels are above rigorous academic investigation. I realize that it is often asserted that the Gospels are unreliable. My point is that no arguments to date have, in my view, been cogent enough to make them stick. If this makes me an inerrantist, so be it. Former ICBI president (and fellow Basler) James Montgomery Boice once wrote:

Members of the Council believe that they are simply calling a mountain a mountain and think it is reasonable to expect that the ICBI will be a unifying force within evangelicalism, as it encourages Christian brothers and sisters to stand for the only objective basis of a sure foundation from God there is — inerrancy.

Bless God for the light He has given us in the Scriptures for our journey through this dark world!

Sorry for posting so much about me of late. I think we all need a break from that, don’t you? So, to change the subject ….

The journal New Testament Studies has kindly been allowing access to several of its essays for free. I have been reading Graham Stanton’s “The Fourfold Gospel” with great interest, since I am a proponent of the “Fourfold Gospel Hypothesis.” (See my Why Four Gospels?) The essay, of course, assumes a commitment to the Markan Priority Hypothesis.

When Matthew wrote his Gospel, he did not intend to supplement Mark: his incorporation of most of Mark’s Gospel is surely an indication that he intended that his Gospel should replace Mark’s, and that it should become the Gospel for Christians of his day. Similarly Luke. Luke’s Preface should not be dismissed merely as the evangelist’s way of honouring literary convention. There is little doubt that Luke expects that his more complete Gospel will displace his predecessors, even though he may not intend to disparage their earlier efforts. Whether or not John knew of the existence of one or more of the synoptic gospels, he seems to have expected that his Gospel would win wide acceptance as the Gospel.

If I may be permitted a few random reflections …

I deeply appreciate Stanton’s tireless work in Gospel studies. However, as I have tried to show in my book, to understand how the four Gospels got to us, one needs to forget virtually everything that has been previously accepted as fact about the Synoptic Problem. The Fourfold Gospel Hypothesis does not allow readers to acquire a new idea that can be applied to their existing solution to the problem. Simply put, students of the Gospels cannot hold to the traditional solution of Markan Priority and accept the concepts that are put forth in Why Four Gospels? Let me elucidate:

1) The Markan Priority Hypothesis — which is the “affirmed” interpretation of history based almost exclusively on the internal evidence — is fatally flawed when one takes into account the writings of the earliest Christian fathers. Regrettably, any theory of New Testament interpretation, once it is established, becomes nearly impossible to dislodge, even if new (and seemingly contradictory) evidence is produced. Any new interpretation of the events, if it is to be accepted, must be built around the old consensus and incorporated into it, even at the expense of logic. An example of this is the Farrer Hypothesis, which dispenses with “Q” while insisting on Markan Priority. Indeed, so embedded is the popular view in the public consciousness that it is nearly impossible to dismiss it. The story is “safe,” and the matter is not really open to debate. In my opinion, New Testament scholarship has become so preoccupied with maintaining the status quo that it has neglected to explore the external evidence. Moreover, I think there is insufficient curiosity, generally speaking, as to why the Gospels were written in the first place.

2) As I have noted, the accepted version of the story focuses on the external evidence. If, however, one were to seriously investigate the external evidence — the evidence provided by the patristic testimony — it would become evident that current explanations are incongruent and incompatible with the opinions of the fathers. Why, for example, did Clement of Alexandria insist that the Gospels “containing the genealogies” (i.e., Matthew and Luke) were written first? And why is Matthew always listed as the first Gospel? Why is Mark’s Gospel consistently described not as an independent work of Mark but as a record of the words of the apostle Peter? In light of this evidence, it seems illogical to believe that our earliest Gospel was written by Mark, a non-eyewitness.

3) Ensconced deeply in the affirmed version is the notion that Mark contains inferior grammar to that found in Matthew and Luke. Some Markan priorists have even gone so far as to claim that Mark contains “errors” that were subsequently “corrected” by Matthew and Luke. Yet each of these supposed “errors” allows for a plausible alternative explanation that does not require Markan priority (as I have attempted to show here). If the New Testament student desires a complete understanding of the factors that led up to the writing of the Gospels, the internal evidence alone simply does not provide it. The external evidence keeps getting in the way of the affirmed version.

4) Again, why are the fathers so adamant that Matthew came first? Why did Clement aver that Matthew and Luke came before Mark? Why do the fathers go to great lengths to show that Mark never set out to write a Gospel but simply recorded the words of Peter as they were spoken before his Roman audience? What has prevented proponents of the affirmed view from asking these vital questions? The answer, in my opinion, is that the consensus view is falsely shackled to a misguided preference for the internal evidence. In short (and this post is already way too long!), as long as the patristic testimony is ignored, the internal evidence, which by its very nature is subjective, will continue to reign supreme. And as long as the traditional view is anchored in the minds of scholars, the solution will remind hidden.

So what is the simplest explanation of the facts — all the facts? To discover that, one must be bold. The missing pieces of the puzzle must be included if we are to assemble the whole puzzle rather than leaving them out because they do not seem to fit. Taking the external evidence into account will have serious repercussions. The answer to the Synoptic Problem will remind incomplete until a central piece of the puzzle is in place.

6:56 AM Jim Wallace had penned a fine piece called How Can We Trust the Gospels When the Genealogy of Jesus Is So Different? Many New Testament scholars question the historical reliability of the four Gospel accounts of the life of Christ. They insist that the records are filled with after-the-fact embellishments — a fact that requires scholars to search for the “historical Jesus” beneath the accretions of tradition, much like peeking an opinion to its core. For example, on one of the most important points of the Jesus story — the resurrection and the empty tomb — all the Gospels agree. Yet even when confronted with this evidence many people do not find the truth of the resurrection easy to accept. Nevertheless, belief in the resurrection of Christ is essential to our faith. Apostolic preaching confirmed it and even made it a condition of salvation: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9).

I wrote my book Why Four Gospels? not so much to argue for Matthean priority as to affirm the complete historicity and apostolicity of the Gospels. Early in my Christian experience I discovered that the Gospels were — and needed to be — central in my understanding not only of the Good News about Jesus Christ but of life itself. Only the cross of Jesus can supply meaning to life, and that is because the cross and the resurrection are an interwoven reality. Of one thing I am quite certain: Christianity is a historical faith. It is rooted and grounded in historical fact. No “leap of faith” is required to believe in Jesus. As I once heard Francis Schaeffer put it in Switzerland, you don’t have to put your brain in park or neutral to become a Christian. His cross is the center of all history. It is the crossroads of the universe. No one can avoid confrontation with it.

It is my prayer that skeptics may come to the Gospels with an open mind and heart, for there the living Christ is ready to meet Doubting Thomases in their pessimism and the travelers to Emmaus in their intellectualism.

11:36 AMNow this was a fun read: The awkward truth about snake-handling: it’s totally Biblical. It all depends on how you read Mark 16:9-20 — original or not? The commenter is correct when he says, “There are plenty of biblical inerrantists who correctly discern this long ending of Mark as extra-biblical, using basic textual criticism.” Alas, there are other biblical inerrantists would politely disagree. Which is why I published Perspectives on the Ending of Mark. Read at your own risk!

Tim Henderson may be changing his mind, though not to the fourfold gospel hypothesis. It does appear, however, that he may abandon Q. It’s possible that the “Farrer-Goulder-Goodacre-Watson hypothesis” now has two many names in its title. 🙂